To be read FIRST in the event of my death.

And not before.

Although Mills, I know I don’t have to worry.

There is no such thing as you not following instructions.

xox

Dearest Mills,

I must be dead. I can’t think how I would have died. Thirty-nine years old and in rude health. An hour of yoga a day and finally kicked the cigarettes—a nasty little habit I picked up in France, but more on that later. It can only have been a horrific accident.

I’m turning forty this year. I always thought I would be fine with that. But as the date gets closer, I’m thinking about the past more than ever. Things that happened when I was nineteen are still as meaningful to me as they were in the moment that they first happened—and the future I looked forward to then hasn’t turned out the way I expected. They say youth is wasted on the young, but it feels to me like not a moment is wasted—we carry our youth with us forever. How I felt when I was sixteen, who I loved when I was nineteen, what I regretted at twenty-one—none of this goes away. It’s all me, it’s all still here.

Mostly I’ve been thinking about the overseas trip I took the year I turned nineteen. It all comes back to that trip. Things happened on that trip I want you to know about. There have always been things I wanted to explain to you, but words between us have a way of getting tangled up and misconstrued. Of course, I hope you never have to read these letters. I hope we both lead long and fulfilling lives and one day, on the veranda at Matilda Downs, I will gather the courage to tell you my story in person.

But, just in case, these letters are my insurance policy. A promise to myself that one day this story will be told. Even as I write them, I worry about getting the words down right, so I have a crazy idea. Reading the words is not enough. I want you to walk in the hushed halls of the National Gallery of London, to breathe deeply in the salty island air of the Île de Clair and shelter in the green gardens of Pond Cottage. I’m going to ask you to visit these places and do something for me. And because I’m dead and it’s my last request, you’ll have to do it…

Continue reading the extract here…

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